Georgetown, Exumas, Bahamas

0 nm
Wind: SW 5-10 knots, heavy rain all night and morning

Karl took a bath in the dinghy today, which was full of rather dingy water from all the rain we’ve been having. Ha. Dingy dinghy water. He actually hopped down there and lathered up, like in a bathtub. He pulled out a couple of buckets for me, too (our one leaky plastic bucket and the other good bleach bucket he rescued from our rusty anchor chain) and I showered in the cockpit, a luxury for me because generally I only use two gallons worth from the solar shower bag.

I rinsed my hair about ten times and now it’s soft and silky and shiny and I feel wonderful. Bathing in rainwater--didn’t Cleopatra or someone do that? Not that it’ll last long. Tomorrow I’ll be slimy and stinky from sweat again, with all the humidity in the air, and my fingernails will be dirty from my own body grime. The baths in rainwater are the romantic part of life on a sailboat. The dirt is not.

Our morning activity energized us for the rest of the day, so we went to the post office and bank in town, and then to the grocery store to buy perishable provisions, including lettuce, tomatoes, and ground beef. I’ve been trying to convince Karl to have our friends over to dinner to repay them the hospitality they’ve extended to us. So we did a quick but thorough boat cleanup, I made a big pot of spaghetti, and we had everyone over. It was extremely fun--we’ve never had that many people on our boat before.

I love entertaining, but I’m a lousy housekeeper, and you kind of need the latter to be the former. Still, everyone had a good time. We had taken our rain tarp down in order to get more breeze in the cockpit, and, wouldn’t you know, as soon as everyone had been here a half-hour the skies opened up again. So we all had to crowd below in our little boat. With the hatches closed, six people down there breathing, and the oven going for garlic bread, the heat was nearly unbearable. The guys just sat in the cockpit in the rain for a while, getting wet, and all us girls took turns out there too, cooling down.

The best part of the evening was being inducted into the Porch Pirates Association by Dan and Dee, who are official Senior Ambassadors for the Southern Hemisphere. We have a Letter of Marque written on an old chart and everything. We’re entitled, now, to never let the truth get in the way of a good story, so if you read stories of flying pink polka-dotted dragons on this web journal henceforth, you may be wise to disbelieve them. We have our Letter of Marque proudly displayed on the wall for all to see, with its bold letters declaring the Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy injunction: Don’t Panic. An excellent adage to post on a bulkhead in any yacht.

I can’t believe I forgot to mention, too: our radio came!!! Shocker of all shocks! So all this time we’ve been squandering, doing nothing, lounging about, reading paperbacks, we could’ve been getting ready to go. Now we still need to do our full reprovision, do something about the dirty diesel in our tanks, fill up with fresh water and get rid of trash--all those mundane details of boat life we’ve been putting off.